This week on Virtually Speaking Science, I chatted with Drexel University physicist Dave Goldberg, who writes the io9 “Ask a Physicist” column and is the author of one of my fave physics books of 2013, The Universe in the Rearview Mirror...

This week saw the release of the Edge Annual Question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Many excellent responses were submitted; the Time Lord zeroed in on the various entries dealing with Falsifiability, cause and effect, IQ, and the universe as his faves, while Kate Clancy took a good, hard look at The Way [...]..

“Information is the currency of nature.” — Seth Lloyd Jen-Luc Piquant spent the entire week at the FQXI conference, exploring the foundational questions relating to the Physics of Information in the idyllic beachfront setting that is Puerto Rico’s island of Vieques...

If you’re a fan of poisons and 1920s New York City, be sure and tune into PBS American Experience at 8 PM EST tonight, when it debuts the TV adaptation of Deborah Blum’s bestselling The Poisoner’s Handbook...

Christmas approacheth (for those who celebrate) and Jen-Luc Piquant received an early present: the Cocktail Party Physics post, “The Science of Mysteries: Leave Us the Counterpoint” — an homage to a key theme in the Dorothy Sayers classic mystery Gaudy Night — was selected for Open Lab 2013...

Sometimes science is all about uncovering hidden patterns. When Daniel Zitterbart of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany spent some time in Antarctica researching seismology several years ago, he noticed something curious about the local Emperor penguins: the males tended to huddle together in very dense formations, often thousands at a time...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.